This chapter opens with a discussion of the political importance of the vocabulary and concepts available to us, and the ways in which knowledge is bound up with power. It argues that man-made language and perspectives cannot adequately express women’s experiences and needs, and that when feminists ‘name’ men’s abuse of power, this is a first step towards ending it. The next section focuses on feminist analyses of the ‘sex/gender distinction’; it finds that, although this can be problematic and difficult to sustain, it remains politically useful. The final section discusses the importance of developing a woman-centred feminist vocabulary around ‘rape’ and ‘sexual harassment’ to enable us to see the extent of men’s sexual violence by men against women, to link this with male power and to act collectively to resist it (for example, through the #MeToo movement).

This chapter asks whether feminists can find any answers in Marxist theory, and it argues that, although Marxism has often been limited by its male-stream assumptions, it can be developed in feminist ways. It begins with a brief discussion of some central terms and ideas, before tracing the evolution of Marxist feminist debates around the relationship between capitalism and women’s oppression from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The chapter then focuses on the concept of ‘social reproduction’, and it supports the arguments of those feminists who argue that the conflicting needs of the ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ economies are likely to lead to crisis. The chapter also draws on Marxist concepts to challenge neoliberal assumptions and reframe key issues from a feminist and socialist perspective.

This chapter examines the claim that a new form of ‘neoliberal feminism’ is both taking over feminism and using it to legitimise new forms of exploitation. It finds that neoliberal politicians will support equal rights for women when it is profitable to do so, and that this can produce benefits for some groups. However, neoliberalism ignores the poverty, exploitation and inequality that its policies also produce, and it cannot see the economic or social value of women’s traditionally unpaid work. The chapter agrees with critics of neoliberal feminism that it does not provide a way forward for women, but it rejects the claim that feminism as a whole has been taken over. The chapter’s final section looks at the case of the British Conservative Party, and links Theresa May’s failure to deliver her promises to women to the contradictory nature of her neoliberal thinking.

I begin the analysis of populism by outlining and defending a certain conception of democracy. This does not involve a typology of forms of democracy – direct as opposed to representative democracy, and so forth – but rather delineates what I consider the animating principle and, to some extent, paradox of democracy, namely popular sovereignty. Here the theory is largely drawn from two sources: on the one hand, from the democratic theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and, on the other, from the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière. While there are important differences between these thinkers, the crucial commonality is an idea of democratic politics as based on radical dissent that constantly contests given political legitimacy. What Rancière, in particular, highlights, is the inherent tension within any democratic polity between the bureaucratic managers and the enfranchised electorate. The former project a ‘born to rule’ sense of entitled social and technocratically grounded political legitimacy, while the latter contest this privilege in the name of no qualification other than their being present within the political community. This latter claim on behalf of an ‘unqualified’ electorate lies at the heart of the intersection between constitutional democracy and populism. On this basis, it is argued that populism is an inalienable feature of democracy and not an extraneous element bent on its destruction. In other words, populism is construed as essential rather than alien to democracy.

This chapter shows how Owen Jones’s (2011) book Chavs documents the denigration of working-class solidarity and, in so doing, accounts for the rise of populist sentiment among the British working class. In popular news and entertainment media – amidst a landscape of exponential corporate consolidation – portrayals of the working class are transformed from a celebration of integrity in the face of adversity typical of the 1950s ‘kitchen-sink drama’, to a lampooning of feckless social welfare dependency and antisocial behaviour by the 1990s and beyond. Complementing Jones’s account of the denigration of working-class lives, Richard Sennett (2006, 2008, 2012) incisively portrays the demoralizing impact of neoliberal conditions of work. Most recently, these conditions have come to attention under the banner of the ‘gig economy’. While this economy is defended by the executives of disruptive start-ups in the name of corporate flexibility and employee choice, the stark reality of precarious employment readily undermines this rationalizing of employment casualization and worker precarity. In this connection, Angela McRobbie’s (2016) probing analysis of the ‘creative industries’ offers a further, devastating critique of the New Labour project. Contemporary work conditions offer thereby a powerful and concrete context in which the seeding ground of contemporary populism can be located.

This chapter starts with the ideas of the black American feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who introduced the concept of intersectionality in 1989 to expose the invisibility of black women in both feminist and anti-racist theory and politics. The chapter explores the earlier history of the idea, before tracing its movement into mainstream feminist thought and assessing debates around its use and meaning today. It argues against open-ended individualistic approaches that ignore structural forms of power and reduce intersectionality to a bland form of ‘identity politics’. The chapter also argues that, although there are a number of socially significant differences and identities, intersectional analysis should generally focus on the ‘big three’ of gender, race and class, and that women who are multiply oppressed should be at the heart of feminist theory and practice. The chapter concludes with some examples of intersectional approaches in Europe and the UK, focusing on the implications for anti-discrimination legislation and some forms of feminist activism.

Our investigation begins by situating the analysis offered in the book within the burgeoning field of academic studies on populism. While acknowledging common ground with other recent investigations, it is made clear that the general argument of the book stands at odds with the current consensus on populism as a fundamentally reactionary, nationalistic, or even straightforwardly xenophobic mode of contemporary politics. In sharp contrast to this dominant view, the underlying argument advanced in the book is that contemporary populism in the UK is a reaction to the decades-long process of neoliberalization, which began with Thatcher in the 1980s and was consolidated with Blair and New Labour between 1997 and 2010. As a result of this process, the British working class was essentially rendered homeless within the UK by a Labour Party increasingly anxious to distance itself from its heritage of working-class struggle and labour-union organization. The rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the 2000s articulated a certain disenchantment among the British working class about the established parties. The Great Recession beginning in 2008, and the period of Conservative-led austerity politics it ushered in, further alienated the working class from the political establishment and gave rise to the populist sentiment given consummate expression in the Brexit referendum result of 2016. The introduction concludes with a synopsis of each of chapter in the book.

In the last decades, Karl Polanyi has gained recognition as one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century. His seminal book, The Great Transformation, is listed among twentieth- century classics. How can this book, written more than seventy-five years ago, be applied to the current conditions? In order to answer this question the chapter not only compares the civilization of the nineteenth century in Europe with our own epoch. It also reconstructs some of Polanyi’s most important insights, such as his critique of the liberal utopia (in its classical and neoliberal version), his interpretation of the double movement, his vision of the meaning of the industrial revolution, his understanding of the problem of freedom in a complex society and his idea of a necessary ‘reform of human consciousness’. The chapter closes with a discussion of the question of how Polanyi’s categories can be used fruitfully so as to throw light to the post-war era and our society today.

This chapter turns to the founding figures and works of British cultural studies, in which a renewed conceptualization of the working class was achieved. Richard Hoggart’s (1957) The Uses of Literacy blazed a trail in the academic portrayal of British working-class culture. This analysis highlights the very feature commonly identified as the hallmark of the populist collective consciousness: an unremitting and radical polarization between the ‘Them’ of the political establishment and the ‘Us’ of the working-class populace. Hoggart’s 1950s analysis also foresaw the danger of a creeping capitalist commercialization of the British working-class lifeworld, particularly through the workings of the popular mass media. His contemporary, Raymond Williams, a fellow cultural studies pioneer, complements and amplifies this analysis with his idea of democratic popular culture as a ‘long revolution’. It is the revolution of popular control over the material conditions of everyday life that constitutes Williams’s notion of progressive democracy, an idea I adopt and apply to contemporary populism throughout this book. With the advent of Thatcherite neoliberalism in the UK, this revolution is stalled as the idea of collective responsibility and the practices of working-class solidarity are denigrated and steadily eroded.